PEN defends Belarusian immigrants at Human Rights Council event

June 14, BPN. Taćciana Niadbaj, chair of the Belarusian PEN Center, has called on the international community to help the Belarusians who have been forced to leave their homeland.

“Do not count out Belarus and the Belarusians who have been forced to leave,” she told an online conference organized as part of the UN Human Rights Council’s 50th session on June 14.

Cultural figures who have managed to flee and avoid imprisonment “experience discrimination on the basis of nationality, as representatives of a co-aggressor country,” Niadbaj said.

She noted that in her homeland, culture was under strong Russian influence, with Belarusian culture “being destroyed”.

“[Alaksandr] Łukašenka is the head of a concentration camp, and [Vladimir] Putin wants to make the same concentration camp in Ukraine,” she added.

But “the Belarusians are fighting, opposing both the Russian world and the dictatorial regime”.